When the Flames Go Up

When you think about a quintessential Fifties Moment, Bill Braine’s 55th birthday checks a lot of boxes. At the midpoint of his 50s, he was recovering from hip replacement surgery, adjusting to his new CPAP machine, and negotiating intently with his parents to downsize and de-clutter.

He was also continuing his now-14-year tradition of mapping out his annual goals with his adapted method of Getting Things Done, a mural-sized type of bullet journal that helped keep him on task to write his first novel, Bone Hollow.

If you’ve considered treating a bum hip or sleep apnea, Bill offers reassuring details and advice for each. You can deny your hip pain for years, but sometimes a very loving partner has to show you how mundane hip replacements are (his doctor replaced nine that day). And they’ll even mail you your femur for conversion into any number of objets d’art!

Thanks for listening to When the Flames Go Up! Please consider a paid subscription to support our writing and podcasting and replacement of our body parts.

We also talk about the entertainment value of Dull Men, the irony of AI robots that watch you sleep, and how turning 50 is all about appreciating life’s minutiae.

Other links:

* Follow Bill on Mastodon

* Meet Bill on January 30 as he discusses his novel in Cornwall, NY

* Learn more about pączki

* How to stretch your hip flexors with an inversion table

* Podcaster and writer Merlin Mann

* Self-publish with Lulu.com

* When Liz Lemon thought organizing would make her wonderful

This episode is an experiment. Our primary goal for this podcast is and always will be to learn more about our mid-lives, helped by the expertise and experiences our guests offer up. And we’ve got lots of chat partners lined up over the next several weeks to do that.

Sometimes, though, we learn by doing what we’ve done best since we met in 1996: killing a cold afternoon with hot coffee, talking about anything and everything until one of us notices it’s gotten dark outside.

We had all the chat time in the world over the weekend, since Magda was back in Michigan and the thermometer read -6°. We rejoiced that Northern Exposure reruns have finally emerged from the morass of licensing disputes and decided the vivid backstories of the older characters are much more interesting than those whiny 20-somethings. We realized that the 25th anniversary of the day we got married is coming up in April. And there were interesting revelations about frostbite, Jesus, kombucha, the unpredictable human heart, and when perimenopause give you “brain zaps.”

Thanks for listening to When the Flames Go Up! Please consider a paid subscription to support our writing and podcasting and resistance to brain zaps.

Thanks for playing along with us and listening to this thing. When the Flames Go Up is all about the surprises of our 50s, and one of the great surprises of our 50s is that, after we split, we could ever reclaim the friendship we found back in the 1900s and just sit and chat like we used to.

Links:

* Homeland Security consulted science fiction writers about potential future threats

* Internet Brands wants you to please return to in-person work, or else (video here)

It’s our first podcast episode of 2024! And we’re greeting the new year with a discussion with writer Jeff Bogle about holidays, death, serendipity, literature, and cats. It’s a difficult episode to encapsulate in one blurb, so let’s try three:

* Late last year, Jeff randomly tweeted an idea for a book and walked away a month later with a literary agent and a deal for “Street Cats and Where to Find Them.” The manuscript is due in July.

* Christmas has always been a huge holiday for Jeff’s extended family, and they’re still trying to find the new rhythm after his father and brother died.

* At 48, Jeff discovered an unexpected passion when he started his Stanchion literary zine, which for its latest issue received 1,800 submissions in 24 hours.

In order to travel the world to make this book come together, all while publishing Stanchion and being the primary parental contact for his teenage daughter, he’s going to need a lot of help from his mom, his ex-wife, and his wife-wife. He might not be 50 years old yet, but he’s living through a lot of a 50-year-old’s reality.

Thanks for listening to When the Flames Go Up! Please consider a paid subscription to support our writing and podcasting and conjuring book deals out of the ether.

We also talk about mocktails and sober entertaining, having your widowed mom as your downstairs neighbor, and being weirdly passionate enough to drive 20 roundtrip hours for a hockey game.

Other links:

* Follow Jeff on Instagram (OWTK used to stand for Out With the Kids)

* Follow Stanchion on Instagram

* Watch “Kedi,” the documentary about street cats in Istanbul

There’s a reason why family advisors—therapists, coaches, lawyers, and such—refer to January as Divorce Month. The holidays can be joyful, but they also represent the end of another cycle, a gauntlet just to get through and then consider if you want to go through another cycle with your spouse.

That’s why certified divorce coach Kate Anthony’s new book, The D-Word: Making the Ultimate Decision About Your Marriage becomes available on December 26. The holidays may be over, but for some the thinking over potentially life-changing decisions is just beginning.

Along with her extensive training, Kate brings the experience of her own divorce and her renewed friendship with her ex-husband into her practice, where she helps women identify emotional and/or financial abuse and advises how to respond. She also outlines the events and emotions to expect (or are not expectable), so you can approach divorce with a clear head and some “No Shit, Sherlock” friends.

Thanks for listening to When the Flames Go Up! Please consider a paid subscription to support our writing and podcasting and healing after stuff gets put asunder.

We also talk about how to put your needs first so you can pursue them from a stable place, building proper boundaries, coping with mental illness and codependence, and why the D in “D-Word” can stand for a lot of things—even dismemberment!

Other links

* Follow Kate on Instagram and subscribe to her weekly podcast

* More people are divorcing after age 50 than ever before

* An example of imago relationship therapy

* Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Thurston

* The wagon wheel coffee table, and Mr. Zero knew.

Sure, you’ve cross-country skied since childhood, earned an MBA, and been a working mom for 19 years. But can you run for 100 kilometers? In a row? Soon after her hair went silver, Annie Crombie discovered she could. And she really liked it.

Most long-distance runners look at finishing a marathon as an ultimate goal. During this podcast, we sit mostly goggle-eyed while Annie describes the thrill of running almost two-and-a-half marathons on a cold, dark trail, with 16 pounds of emergency supplies on her back.

Running (or run-walking, or power-strolling, or anything your bones can manage) seems like a perfect hobby to take up in midlife, to keep your body moving and give your mind a much-needed meditative reset. (See also: Forrest Gump.) Annie’s example shows that whenever you think your body has achieved all it can, you might be wonderfully, ridiculously surprised.

Thanks for listening to When the Flames Go Up! Please consider a paid subscription to support our writing and podcasting and perplexed awe of ultramarathoners.

We also talk about embracing a nontraditional education for our kids, trans-Atlantic eldercare, and whether Banff is the funniest-sounding city in North America.

Other links:

* Annie’s Instagram feed and her blog post about her first ultramarathon

* The Trail Society podcast (listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple podcasts)

* Eddie Izzard ran 32 marathons in 31 days and raised $500K for charity

* Candice Burt ran 200 ultramarathons in 200 days

* Diana Nyad swam more than 100 miles from Cuba to Florida at age 60

* Crossing the Pyrenees: 681.17 miles from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic

* Find a Trail Sisters running community near you.

* Liz Lemon’s mustache

One of the myriad misconceptions about menopause and perimenopause is that they’re only “for old women.” A wide range of potential (and potentially dangerous) symptoms can start as early as your mid-30s and last for as long as 14 years. It’s kind of a No Woman’s Land.

Jackie Piasta, WHNP-BC, NCMP, has devoted her medical career to treating, educating, and mentoring about menopause because there’s so much more to know and—thanks to the “Silver Tsunami”—so many more people who will need to know it.

Much of our talk centers around exposing the flaws in the 2002 Women’s Health Initiative report, which misleadingly linked hormone replacement therapy with an increased risk of breast cancer, and the walkback spearheaded by Dr. Robert Langer, one of the report’s authors, with his ‘Tis But A Scratch response.

Thanks for listening to When the Flames Go Up! Please consider a paid subscription to support our writing and podcasting and insights into when ovaries go out of business.

We also talked about how she got into the menopause specialty so young, the challenges of these stages of life for the patient and the provider, and what she thinks providers need to focus on in order to override all the misinformation.

Perimenopause and menopause can be disorienting and distressing kicks in the ass that people with and without uteruses don’t talk about nearly enough. Jackie’s insights explain a whole lot—and warn you against referring to hot flashes as "power surges.”

Other links:

* Jackie’s Monarch Healthcare offers telehealth care and consultation

* Follow Jackie on Instagram

* How Prempro (aka Premarin) is used in HRT

* Estrogen Matters by Avrum Bluming, MD and Carol Tavris, PhD

* The Let’s Talk Menopause advocacy group

* Naomi Watts wants everyone to talk about menopause

* Dena Norton MS, RD, LD is Back to the Book Nutrition on Instagram

* The North American Menopause Society (menopause.org)

* Louise Newson website and Instagram (Balance app)

* The International Society for the Study of Women’s Sexual Health (ISSWSH)

* The Rosy app

Like all the best podcasts, this talk with Ian Shea-Cahir could spawn a half-dozen new episodes. We could talk about his career in journalism or his job running Princeton University’s social media team. We can talk about divorce, co-parenting, remarriage, forgiveness, redemption, and parenting a tween in your 50s. We can talk about the pressures of his Mexican/Irish background, or hitting rock bottom with depression and how learning to manage it saved his life.

We talked about all of that.

But our main topic was how to defy news fatigue and keep pursuing your political passions, mostly by remembering that all politics is local. In a two-tiered strategy that deploys the blowhards to grab headlines, the real work happens behind the scenes when the serious people get to work. That’s how, for example, his current home state of Kansas preserved a woman’s right to choose despite not having voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1964.

Thanks for listening to When the Flames Go Up! Please consider a paid subscription to support our writing and podcasting.

We also talk about understanding his privilege, why Gen Z fuels his optimism, getting punched at a town hall meeting, and how interviewing Tom Morello inspired him to rage against the machine.

Other links:

* Follow Ian on TikTok.

* Eddie Adams leaves home in Boogie Nights (did you know Joanna Gleason is Monty Hall’s daughter?)

* “How do you do, fellow kids?”

* From A Bug’s Life: “Those puny ants outnumber us 100 to 1. And if they every figure that out, there goes our way of life!”

* Amy Poehler as the Cool Mom in Mean Girls

* Rep. Jeff Jackson (D-NC) explains government on Instagram

* Eddie Murphy “experiences America” as a white man

* Frank Costanza speaks Korean

* Jim Valvano’s iconic speech about fighting cancer: “Never, ever give up.”

* Trey Gowdy appears on The Late Show

It’s Thanksgiving Week in America, which launches the joyful, year-end tradition of crowded travel, meal preparation, frenzied purchases, crushing ambivalence, and family drama known as the Holiday Season.

What better time to launch a bonus episode about Candletime, the holiday created to help you survive it all, with only a candle and a drinking vessel?

Candletime is the People’s Holiday, created by Magda many years ago (as a companion to her book, Get Christmased) to help people stay centered during a time that knocks you off balance. It’s simple, it’s adaptable, and it’s meant to give anyone a holiday unimpinged by anybody else’s anything.

Thanks for listening to When the Flames Go Up! Please consider a paid subscription to support our writing and podcasting and commitment to holiday relaxation.

A perfect listen for long a car trip, or spatchcocking the bird of honor, or any other opportunity to grab a free moment and help focus on whatever you’re thankful for.

Breaking up with academia felt a lot like a messy divorce for Emily Benson, PhD, who needed a career change after 11 years as a management professor. Throughout that time, she helped hundreds of students assess their skill sets and build the narratives that would secure the jobs that best matched their abilities and ambitions.

After her own successful career shift, however, she has pivoted to help more seasoned professionals defy the ageism and self-doubt associated with changing careers in midlife.

Job searching after a few decades in the workforce can seem like a high-stakes effort, but it doesn’t have to be. You have a record of achievement, a perspective borne from overcoming adversity, and a ton of life experience that the best employers will not ignore. You can decide what success looks like to you now, and you don’t have to take a pay cut to find it.

Thanks for listening to When the Flames Go Up! Please consider a paid subscription to support our writing and podcasting and ambivalence toward higher education.

We also talk about how to get outside your head before you compose your professional story, why working with your ex can be great, and why A.I. and COVID make excellent scapegoats.

Questions for Emily? Join us in our Facebook group on Monday, Nov. 20, from 12-1pm ET, for an exclusive Q&A with her about how to make you next professional leap.

Other links:

* Connect to Emily on LinkedIn

* How many times did you watch Bridgerton during lockdown?

* Morganna the Kissing Bandit invades the MLB All-Star Game

Fair warning: After you listen to this episode, you might develop a compelling aspiration to downsize everything into a 30-foot motor home and hit the road. Author and recovering attorney Michelle Fishburne did that in 2020 and spent much of those 12,000 miles talking to hundreds of people across the country about how they endured the COVID lockdown.

The result is Who We Are Now: Stories of What Americans Lost & Found during the COVID-19 Pandemic, a unique look at the under-reported empathy we felt for each other as our lives took so many unexpected turns.

A third-generation Happy Nomad who had spent 10 months “roadschooling” her young children, Michelle went mobile after COVID took her highfalutin political job in Washington, DC. Since then, she’s learned the power of betting on yourself and catching your luck when it comes along. And one of the best ways to prove that personal interactions aren’t nearly as fraught as they’re portrayed is to go interact with those persons yourself.

Thanks for listening to When the Flames Go Up! Please consider a paid subscription to support our writing and podcasting and dreaming about a rootless life.

We also talk about how building a flexible schedule makes you available when your family needs you, how our 50s offer great opportunities to take outlandish risks, and why Doug is an excellent name for an ex-husband.

Other links:

* Follow Michelle on Instagram and Threads

* Humans of New York has been telling out stories since 2010

* How Landing works like a longer-term Airbnb

* The Otter app records and transcribes your audio

* Visit beautiful Pine Bluffs, Wyoming

* On the road with John Steinbeck, Charles Kuralt, and Steve Hartman

* The View From My Window Facebook group